Currently new techniques are under development, for manufacturing large-capacity airplanes for civil use and for transporting passengers. According to such techniques, the load beaannular structure of the aircraft fuselage is mostly made up of composite materials, such as carbon fibers buried in suitable resins. A technique currently under way of development consists in assembling the airplane fuselage by connecting a plurality of cylindrical and non-cylindrical segments, currently named “barrel” in the Anglo-Saxon technical jargon, or correspondingly “barili” in the Italian jargon.
The barrels that will form an aircraft can be manufactured by different constructors, and delivered already provided with floors, seats, windows and doors before the complete fuselage is assembled.
Manufacturing an airplane in this way involves among other things unknown problems of industrialization and concerning production equipments: in fact the known production methods and equipments have been used up to now for manufacturing traditional civil aircrafts for transporting passengers, having a mostly metallic fuselage structure—typically made up of titanium and aluminum alloys. Re-using such known production methods and equipments, possibly with relatively contained adaptations, is not sufficient.
An object of the present invention is providing methods and/or equipments for manufacturing the new kind of aircrafts mentioned above, having a fuselage structure largely made up of composite materials.